Well I'm glad AP is getting fresh material. In honor of that I have a story, about Redtails!!!

The other day I told the story about the hawks that were playing tricks on squirrels. Well this is a story about the Redtails! Also known as the Tuskegee Airmen. As you know, the Tuskegee Airmen were a group of black pilots in WWll that were reputed to have never lost a bomber under their protection. This canard(a type of wing on a airplane) later proved to be just that, a canard. But it makes for a good story, and so does this...

I was friends with a commercial director at one time. He directed a commercial with Chuck Yeager.(who was a pilot...of a plane) You probably remember him from the movie THE RIGHT STUFF. He was the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound in the X1.

You might remember the commercial, it was for batteries, it was made in the desert. Anyway, the script Gen. Yeager was supposed to read from was written on the usual large cue cards.

After 3 takes my friend says, "This isn't working Chuck"(I am jealous...Chuck indeed). "we can see your eyes moving". The general thought for a minute and asked "Do you have any index cards?" Some grip did indeed have some index cards, and a sharpie. So the general wrote the entire script on the back of 1 index card. "Okay" he said "just hold this up like you would a regular cue card". The general read his lines, and because the lines were so close together, you couldn't see his eyes moving. Problem solved. I bragged about how good my dads eyes were. Chuck Yeager makes him see like a blind man. And Chuck Yeager sees like a blind man compared to a hawk, or an eagle.

Ps.

I later met the general myself at an airshow, where he flew Glamorous Glennis(his P-51 Mustang) in a recreation of the "Invasion of Normandy". A true American Icon.

I've noticed for a while that one is the runt. Today, I saw both parents actively feeding the non-runts and ignoring the runt. Later, the runt was out of the nest altogether. Right now, the non-runts look quite mature... pre-adult. They're looking very strong, and "Runty" is lolling about, perhaps starving! I think he's slated to die!

I was afraid of that. Not that I've been watching enough to notice there was a runt but I was wondering if three was a normal number or whether there might be some winnowing in the future. I saw this show on tv about some birds, maybe in the Galapagos (maybe boobies), where they always hatch two eggs but eventually they just turn on one of the two babies and kick it out of the nest and let it starve to death while they care for the other one. Even after it's quite large. Mother Nature is one crazy chick (pun intended).

Pre-juvenile. Redtails take a couple years to mature, sometimes more. These are eyasses, i.e. the dwellers in an eyrie. In their next stage they are known as branchers, when they have enough coordination and feathers to move with confidence beyond the nest. When they finally leave the nest and are flying competently they become passagers, meaning they are about to make the passage -- i.e. the first migration. Many raptors continue to share food with their passager offspring, redtails especially. Sometimes passagers help their parents hunt for the next generation siblings, though they have never been seen to do the actual feeding, or even approach the eyrie closer than a few dozen yards.

There were three chicks last year, and one was also a runt, and they all three survived, even after one took a premature tumble from the nest.

I'm not sure why HawkCam wasn't such a sensation last year. It wasn't quite so much a close-up, but the same general thing. Funny how things work.

Saw an email today from someone watching that was concerned about the sun and was wondering if a building or tree had been taken down (No) so the nest was in full sun and the parent was panting "horribly". They wanted an artificial shade put up.

Just watched breakfast. The runt stayed back until the end and got a few shreds of meat and mom or dad took off with a small amount of what was left, maybe the head. Runt still foraging around in the nest for scraps. They are really getting too big for that nest! If one of those eyasses disappears I'm going to have to get creative about what happened to it with my K-3 library watchers. Maybe, went to visit grandma? I just hope no child witnesses the ejection or death.